A handbook on mysticism

Perhaps because of the centrality of spiritual testimony in the history of autobiography, the classic works of religious witnesses emerge again and again over the centuries in fresh translations that bear the mark of their own times as well as the testimony of their original authors. Following her 2002 translation of "Dark Night of the Soul" by St. John of the Cross, Mirabai Starr, a professor of Spanish and of philosophy and religious studies at the University of New Mexico, has translated "The Interior Castle," a manual on contemplative prayer that St. Teresa began in 1577. The translation is earnestly contemporary. What E. Allison Peers' 1972 translation renders "This sort of life will be a great mortification" becomes, in Starr's version, "You might feel ashamed of this lifestyle." And in seeking to calm the overheated spiritual seeker, the Peers version urges "relax as much as you can." Starr turns this to "try to do something for fun."

Starr does not claim to present a rigorously accurate translation that leaves intact St. Teresa's sometimes embarrassing (for feminists at least) habit of self-disparagement and her urgent claims of orthodoxy. Starr even acknowledges "brazenly rewriting" the book "in hopes of making it accessible to a contemporary circle of spiritual seekers." A faintly Buddhist sensibility reigns in the translation: St. Teresa speaks in Starr's version of "mindfulness." "Sin" becomes "limitations" and "negativity," "hell" morphs into "the underworld," and "the devil" is decommissioned as the "spirit of evil." Starr's St. Teresa even speaks of "the perils of unconsciousness" -- a very post-therapy Teresa indeed. Yet this version of St. Teresa's "Interior Castle" -- perhaps a fairer description than "translation" -- delivers what it promises, if at a certain price of historical and theological accuracy. St. Teresa feels immediate, her advice cogent. And this version has the interesting advantage of indicating the tenor of our times, if not St. Teresa's.

"The Interior Castle" is, in effect, an antimemoir. It is St. Teresa's second try (written more than a decade after her 1565 autobiography) at describing the galvanizing, subliminally erotic communion with the divine that is her radical spiritual legacy within Christianity. Unlike the autobiography, this later book is not a personal story. St. Teresa even employs patently transparent locutions like "I know a person who ..." to put a scrim between herself and her testimony.